'We are building a society on selfishness'

As his new exhibition opens at the Design Museum, China's most famous artist Ai Weiwei talks to Nancy Durrant about living in exile, collecting ancient relics and why we need more compassion

- Nancy Durrant

AI WEIWEI is exasperated. "That's a design," he says scathingly, regarding the sleek can of water he's just been handed, and its baffling variation on a ring-pull. "It's very unfamiliar," he adds, turning it up and down and examining its silky pale grey finish. "It could be a tear gas bottle. It looks so serious. So unfriendly." I reach over and show him how to shove the tab to reveal the drinking hole, and he breathes a tiny sigh of gratitude.

"That's a deep problem of design, because it's a funny idea, but it makes life so unnecessarily difficult."

We've been talking about design because this week is the opening of his new exhibition at the Design Museum in Kensington. It's the first to look at Ai's art through this lens, but though one body of work here refers to his co-creation of the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing with the architects Herzog & de Meuron, it's not as if China's most famous dissident artist has suddenly developed a sideline in fancy chairs.

Indeed, his idea of design is very different to that in the West. "In China we don't have that word. Design can be anything as long as a human is consciously trying to give an idea a new form or language, or even vocabulary, which can give a new definition. That is a design."

The show is titled Making Sense, which he calls "a very broad idea", but seems to be very much about making sense of the world as created by humans, or at least exploring its many, often seemingly contradictory layers, through 42 works, from sculpture to photography and film, many of which have not been seen in the UK before, and several of which are going on display for the first time.

A photo series, Provisional Landscapes, captures the empty spaces left by demolition during the unprecedented wave of development in China in the 2000s. It's a meditation on the idea of progress, which, he says, often comes with an assumption that we must destroy the old to move forward.